Blink 7

Identifying the Problem

Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook or another email client gives frequent errors when trying to send mail through Bell Sympatico’s SMTP server. For Thunderbird users, the error message reads as follows:

Sending of message failed.
An error occurred sending mail: unable to connect to SMTP server smtphm.sympatico.ca via STARTTLS since it doesn’t offer STARTTLS in EHLO response. Please verify that your Mail/News account settings are correct and try again.

The service has worked in the past and no settings were recently changed.

Explanation

Depends on who you ask … but Bell is obviously tinkering with its back-end software and inadvertently knocked out a whole bunch of people’s SMTP (outgoing mail) server access.

Solution (for Mozilla Thunderbird)

From the menu, select Tools -> Account Settings…

In the left pane of the Account Settings window, select the option Outgoing Server (SMTP)

In the right pane, select the sympatico.ca server. Click on the Edit button.

In the SMTP Server window, ensure the settings are as follows:

Server Name: smtphm.sympatico.ca
Port: 587
User Name: ____@sympatico.ca
Use Secure Connection: TLS

Click on the OK button
In the Account settings window, click on the OK button

You should once again be able to send email through Sympatico’s SMTP server.

A similar process will have to be performed with other email clients (using the settings described above)